Strong opinions, weakly held

Here’s a story that combines today’s earlier post, about geek ascendancy, with an age old problem, pervasive discrimination against the poor and against minorities. It talks about the use of mapping to expose and fight discriminatory practices that have gone on for decades — excluding minority communities from municipal services like sewer, water, and trash collection and ignoring those communities when planning new roads and so forth. The maps make the problems obvious in a way that no other approach could.